If you think that's weird, well, you don't know the half of it. Because there's a reasonably sizeable number of Ripper obsessives out there - and there's a lot of them, believe us - who think that the killer was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer best known for writing Alice In Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll. We are quite literally through the Looking Glass (snort) here, people. Could the man responsible for such nonsense as the Jabberwocky and The Hunting Of The Snark really be responsible for such barbaric crimes? There's already suggestion of his paedophilic tendencies, but this goes a fair way further than that. Dodgson was teaching at Christ Church up until 1881, again putting him in the right place at the right time. Richard Wallace's book Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend makes the case for Carroll as The Ripper, based on of anagrams found in passages in two of the author's works: an adaptation of Alices Adventures In Wonderland for younger readers, and the first volume of his masterwork, Sylvie and Bruno. Yeah, apparently Dodgson not only found the time to do a bunch of killing on top of everything else he did, but got away with it, and nevertheless inserted a confession into two books of his, waiting for somebody to discover them some decades later. He did like his word games and tricks, though...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
